Is it Possible to Legally & Ethically Spy on Your Competition for Top Search Engine Results?

SEO Elite Review

One of the fastest ways to success in the search engines is to analyse your competitors. You don't really have to understand all the complexities of search engine algorithms. You just need to examine what your competitors are doing and establish what factors led to the results thay are now achieving.

That's easy to say, I know, but how can you actually go about spying on your competition and duplicating their results? What if there was a software package which claims to allow you to do just that? Yeah, I had my doubts too. How could a software program actually do this, and do it ethically?

Some time ago I discovered a program called Link Proctor. What led me to it was the fact it was created by an SEO expert who I had a lot of respect for - Brad Callen. Brad wrote an excellent free course on SEO which you can download from my Free Downloads page.

Anyway, Link Proctor was updated and renamed SEO Elite (thankfully, Link Proctor was an awful name). I still had my doubts that this program could really be effective, but never-the-less I decided to give it a go. Now that I've been using it for some time I can tell you that it's become an extremely valuable tool. It's one of those things you wonder how you ever got by without.

So, what is SEO Elite all about? The main focus of SEO Elite is analysing links. An extremely important factor in search engine rankings is the links that point to your site, specifically who links to you and how they link to you. Here's how you use SEO Elite:

First, do a search at Google for your targeted keywords. Copy the url of the site which sits at the #1 position. Open up SEO Elite and enter that url into a new project. SEO Elite will then find all the sites that link to that site on whatever search engines you specify. It will give you:

• a list of all the urls linking to that site
• the anchor text contained in those links
• the percentage of those anchor text keywords
• the PageRank, Alexa rank and other data related to those inbound link pages

This will give the basis of why that site ranks well for those particular keywords. SEO Elite will also report on on-page factors such as headings, H1 tags, keyword density etc, but it's those anchor text links which play a big role on how a website ranks for specific keywords.

One thing I've found SEO Elite particularly useful for is avoiding an over-optimization penalty. For example, if your site is ranking well for a particular keyword phrase and then suddenly drops out of the rankings altogether, you may be experiencing an over-optimization penalty. Run your site through SEO Elite. If you find that those keywords appear in the anchor text a high percentage of the time, you've found your problem.

If you analyse the top ranking sites you will usually find that the percentage ranges somewhere between 30% - 50%. There are always exceptions of course, but what you want to aim for is a similar percentage of links containing your targeted keywords. If there are too many links pointing to your site with the same anchor text the search engines (particularly Google) will see this as un-natural linking and will penalize you for it. I've seen it happen many times. In fact, you should have many links where the anchor text is just your domain name.

Aim for similar anchor text ratios as the top ranked sites. Look at how many sites are linking to them, who is linking to them and how they are linking to them. This will give you a blueprint for beating them. Remember, you are not out to beat the search engines, just your competitors!

UPDATE: Brad has just sent me a note to say that SEO Elite is about to be upgraded to V4.0 (current users receive the update free). The software is actually made up of several "projects", and analysing backlinks is just one of these projects. Version 4 adds some new projects as well as enhancing the existing ones. Here's a complete list:

• Project 1: Analyze Backlinks Using A Specified Search Engine.
• Project 2: Get Links To Your Website.
• Project 3: Analyze AllinAnchor, AllinText, AllinTitle.
• Project 4: Verify That Link Partners Are Still Linking Back.
• Project 5: Find Where Your Website Is Ranked For A Given Keyword.
• Project 6: Find How Many Web Pages Are Indexed.
• Project 7: Find Possible Authority Websites.
• Project 8: Submit Articles To Article Directories.

Project 8 is still in development, but it is Project 7 which has really got me excited. This will allow you to identify "authority" sites. These are the sites you need to get links from. A single link from one authority site can be worth more than hundreds of links from pages which the search engines don't consider to be important.

Summary

Brad Callen is not only a top SEO expert, he creates some of the best software in the game. SEO Elite is thoroughly useful and effective software. I wouldn't be without it.

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